For me "have fun while writing" increases the odds of posting what I think others might also enjoy.
This is a community of writers, I can tell. While I would like to say that I am a writer as well, admittedly, I write a lot faster than most. I started writing when I started roleplaying, and I've gotten in the habit of quickly writing things down then eagerly awaiting responses. That can be alright, in an environment such as that, but here everyone types elegantly and verbosely, and I feel a bit out of place. I can write detailed and powerful, but I just don't always do that, always aiming for a weird combination of humor and seriousness when writing.
I'm getting off track, but my point is, should I try to write more detailed and elegantly like everyone else here?
As for going too quickly, I always have a lot of things I want to say but I want to try and condense it down more, and think before I write more.
For me "have fun while writing" increases the odds of posting what I think others might also enjoy.
I suppose so, I just don't want to alienate anyone by having a different style.
I can't see that happening here, and feel like the proof of it.
I've felt mostly welcome - despite being what I imagine to be much older than average participant age, and manifesting arguably above average "out there" tendencies.
I'll always wish there could be more interaction, because that's what I valued most in my early "local BBS" and internet experience. But I also understand people seek interactive comfort zones.
That said, I've far less time for this sort of thing that I did even a month or two ago, and thus would never fault others for becoming more meatspace.
Fair enough, I'm just always like this when joining new communities. It is nice to hear that everyone's a bit "out there," makes me feel better about my own "out there"-ness.
On another note, bulletin board systems have always intrigued me, even though I wasn't around when they were prominent. What were they like exactly?
> On another note, bulletin board > systems have always intrigued me, > even though I wasn't around when > they were prominent. What were they > like exactly?
Well... dial-up, of course... so the modem sounds. A few places with deeper pockets had more than one line, but for the most part it was one person logged in at a time. Can't remember the names of the more popular board packages. While I think there was a notion of fora, I'm also remembering uploading/downloading .txt files to communicate. Digitized photos were somewhat the rage.
I went to a couple gatherings of people that logged into one board, and found people of similar mind.
One funny story (in a humbling way). I'd been carrying on with another user named "Honey", whose handle had me imagining, well... all kinds of things. And we met for lunch. And she was a solid four times my weight. :-) Fun to interact with, though.
Heh, sounds like a lot of fun actually! While it may have been slow, it brought people with shared interests together, and I can't think of anything more fun than that.
I kind of wish I could have seen that, instead of Twitter, which is more dramatic than a soap opera, and Facebook, which goes against the fundamental rule of interaction on the internet: never give out your personal information.
But with advances in technology comes more ways to abuse it, I suppose.
The internet has become what I associate with old time billboard advertising pollution on highway off-ramps. At least in that context the billboards didn't suddenly pop-up in front of the steering wheel and/or brake/gas pedals.
The Midnight Pub has been a rare exception in my internet experience in the last couple decades. I want to say the last environ matching my textural needs was Craiglist fora, which actually has me a bit gasping in disbelief. It's just never been the same for me since USENET mostly went by the wayside.
Hey, I've really appreciated your timely interaction! Nice to see replies so quickly - or let's say quickly enough that whatever I wrote you're replying to still constitutes semi-warm mental embers.
In that case, I think I'm really gonna enjoy it here! Its nice to finally find a place that doesn't entirely consist of advertisements and tracking, for once my adblocker can take a break.
Also, you're welcome! I got a lot of time on my hands so I've started checking the pub and reading up on older posts often. It's kinda nice.
Haven't used an ad blocker in ages. Can't remember why. Probably something about feeling cheating for having to make an effort to fix what had long been heralded as a sort of "second coming", i.e. the internet.
But I suppose it was just yet another case of greed ruining things. See also: for the love of monetize.
Somewhere along the line I played with text-only browsers (e.g. lynx, elinks), then raw web scraping. But, again, it started to feel like working for something that was quickly becoming worthless. Vague recollections of becoming weary of keeping up with html keyword augmentation.
I mean, doesn't it say (more like reiterate, really) something about the species that the meat (text) gets buried in gobs more times husk (keywords and syntax guardians) for appearances sake?
And from my point of view, for what? For me, what we've been doing here in this thread is what I've mostly wanted of the internet.
I think I get what you're saying. We keep trying to make things look pretty, look presentable, completely ignoring the internal content that really matters.
I can think of plenty of examples: Celebrities that look pretty but are really not good people underneath, video games with intensely realistic graphics but terrible gameplay, those godawful cherries that Sonic gives you with their milkshakes that are just old rotten cherries loaded with sugar and food coloring... it goes on.
I can get trying to make things look presentable, maybe with a small bit of formatting here and there, but it ends up completely undermining the content inside that we're really there for.
Sorry for going on a bit of a rant, that last point you made just kinda stuck out to me. I agree with you.
Also to make sure, what do you mean by "See also: for the love of monetize."?
Great eye candy examples!
As for "See also: for the love of monetize", our exchange had me remembering the early days of gold-rushery to "monetize" web pages, and thought it fun to substitute it for the word 'money' in "for the love of money" (possibly a Bible phrase...?). The "See also:" part was something I enjoyed leveraging more in the past in forum posts. The time felt right for a reappearance.
As for what it means, to me it's how a shift in focus from a thing-in-itself to its alleged value seems a departure from the joy of sensory here-now to some purely conceptual world/space. For when and/or where is "value"? How does thinking about an object's value hold a candle to experiencing the object? What can be done with so-called "value" but think about it? And isn't that focus shift a sort of first step down Greed Lane?
(I feel I could have said that better, but things happening on the home front are undermining writing focus....)
No, I get what you're saying! What immediately comes to mind is people getting obsessed over their apparent "value" in a society, at their job, or towards others. I get caught up in that sometimes as well. But a person is more valuable than anything else in my opinion.
People get too caught up in value, in worth, in power. We need to lay back and enjoy things, and take life slowly.
That's why I've enjoyed Gemini so far. It focuses on people, on lives, on experiences, on _content_. It doesn't focus on the worth of those things.
I've enjoyed Gemini too, albeit exclusively through a "gemini to web proxy". (I've become a bit hyper minimalist about computing devices, preferring vanilla Chromebooks and their Linux-y "terminal" environments, a few essential packages (vim, tmux), sticking almost exclusively to Lua for more elaborate scripting, so the idea of a standalone Gemini browser sounds like first steps toward maintenance misery....)
Managed to get with Gopher spaces a bit too.
So many wonderful writers down both paths.
I use Gemini browsers since I'm more used to how a web browser works, and by using the mouse. Makes it easier to get into. Although, I do wish I could configure it to look more like a terminal, with fancy scanlines and everything, I like how they look. I guess I could try making my own Gemini implementation and doing it myself.
I've found a lot of writing-focused places around the smol web, and I like reading what they have to offer, you can learn a lot from them.
Agree.
Definitely a lot of smart, interesting people here in The Pub.
I was lucky enough to be tapped on the shoulder to venture this direction by one
~m15oback in my brief
write.asdays.
Oh, that's actually a bit surprising to hear! Didn't know the pub's owner was actually active, that's kind of a rarity I've seen.
And that blog service you shared reminds me, I need to work on my own. I can probably do it over the weekend.
Your own? Is that even legal? :-)
Oh I meant- I meant I was gonna host my own blog on like, a raspberry pi or something along those lines.
Got it.
I've not felt that motivated in quite some time.
A big part of that is having come to believe the cross-section of species population I'd truly enjoy interacting with is so minuscule that surely there are already far and away enough spaces to handily contain them, such that my presenting yet another would likely more likely contribute to a "thinning of the interactions" in existing spaces.
And like this natural-selection-forsaken species needs any more of *that*.... <playful wink to non-believers>
Forgive me, it's likely because I'm a bit tired at the moment, but are you saying that you feel like creating your own blog would lessen interaction in places of the world/internet that cater to those that actually are fun to be around?
I apologize if I'm incorrect.
It's more like simple math rooted in the notion that we all have only so much blogging time in the day after subtracting out necessities like bodily maintenance, earning a living, getting being places, etc.
So let's over-simplify and say that leaves everyone worth communicating with (from a given person's point of view, not in some objective sense) two hours per day to interact with N number of blogs. And, of course, not everyone is visiting the exact same blogs, so it's not like if person A and person B both land on some (N+1)th blog that they'll be missing out on each other. But if they wind up landing different (N+1)th blogs, it takes them time to interact with those blogs, but since it's not the same blog, that time spent at their individual (N+1)th blogs necessarily reduces how much time they have to be aware of and/or interact with each others entries at the blogs they *do* have in common.
I actually have somewhere between 30-60 minutes per day for this, and I really enjoy many of the members. But if one of my favorite members runs off to, say, a raspberry pi blog you create, and I *don't*, that means they're probably going to be spending less time here. And since I won't be there (at your blog, 'cuz I just plain don't have the time), I won't be making up that time with them at your blog... so overall, I'm missing out on someone really enjoy interacting with because we're not longer *as much* in the same blog places.
Something like that.
What drives this thinking in me is there were a few bloggers in Midnight Pub that I *really really really* enjoyed in my early days of being here, and they sudden just plain disappeared.
I can't say for sure it's because they found other blogs they'd rather spend their preciously little blogging time at, or they died, found religion, got tired of my inane ramblings, etc. But the net effect on me was my overall blogging experience declined.
Could I search other blogs for them, or others who wrote like them and/or on topics they elaborated so well? I suppose. And I might find others that fill said void.
But the key word, there, is 'might'. And that search takes time - time away from just plain enjoying what was once a given for me, here.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I think it does. People have limited blogging time, and it's harder to keep up with others when they go off and make their own blogs, and spend less time here in the pub.
Admittedly, when I first discovered Gemini, I was excited that I finally found a world small enough that I could set up a place for myself, and people would actually, maybe, possibly stumble upon it and read my insane, sleep deprivation fueled ramblings.
But I think I see now why the pub exists. It isn't just a basic forum, it's a place where like-minded people can all blog and easily locate each other's blogs. The pub even has a page creator, it's just like making your own capsule.
I don't know if this was your intent, but you've convinced me to stay, at least for a little longer. I can build my small section of the web here.
> Admittedly, when I first discovered > Gemini, I was excited that I finally > found a world small enough that I > could set up a place for myself, > and people would actually, maybe, > possibly stumble upon it and read > my insane, sleep deprivation fueled > ramblings.
Which are, of course, the best kind!
> I don't know if this was your intent, > but you've convinced me to stay, > at least for a little longer. I > can build my small section of the > web here.
That's danged good news for Midnight Pub!
And if you don't mind, could you please ramp up the insane, sleep deprived varietal of updates? ;-)
Sorry for the late reply, yesterday was very hectic, but of course I can ramp them up! Just wait for me to start on late night programming.
And I'm happy to help the pub grow, you've convinced me of its importance.
I'm really looking forward to that late night programming theme from you, as I was in the game for years, but grew weary of it, and now I'm too far out of touch with Planet Full Stack to be able to make honest claims of proficiency worthy of immediate employment.
Well... that, and to me said full-stack-iverse looks more like the high wire act of a 666 ring circus in the service of a tech monster I feel has done more harm than good to a species that was already a fingernail short of utter hopelessness.
In a manner of speaking, of course.... :-)
there are no rules here. for example, this comment is all lowercase. and sometimes ~inquiry's poems are barely one line long. we appreciate them all the same. write however feels natural, and remember to have a drink and give smudge a scritch under the chin once in a while
Thanks, that takes a bit of stress off, actually.
That reminds me, I do have a couple questions regarding the pub. Do you think you could tell me why when referring to users, we use a "~" instead of a "@" like in the regular web? I'm just curious, as I'm not used to it.
Also, I assume Smudge is a cat.
Howdy ~impulse. That '~' is probably my fault. If you look via Webbrowser, then the top entry of everyone is ~NAME, which is probably just a leftover of the Shell notion ~name translating into /home/name (or whatever is listed in /etc/passwd).
Plus I just like ~impulse better than @impulse.
~bartender? One of those large lemonades please, and whatever the newcomers fancy, it's on me.
Cheers!
~ew